Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Some chemotherapy for the cancer

I think a good word to describe George W. Bush would be "petulant." His style of leadership can be boiled down to thus:

"I am the president and the decider. America is addicted to oil. We must stay the course in Iraq. And I resent anyone trying to open up dialogue with another country. That's my job, and I won't do it because it is counterproductive to my goals. If you disagree with me, you enable the terrorists and don't support the troops. After all, God wanted me to be president."

Bush is like a bad caricature of the mustache-twirling villain. Has anyone ever seen a president so unbending, yet so wrong? And have so many people ever suffered for such hubris? Granted, I'm young; I was born when Jimmy Carter was president, so my firsthand experience with presidents is relatively limited. But I have studied history, and I have yet to come up with an American president who based his policies and governance on such distrust of dissent and, by extension, the views of the majority of those he supposedly represents. And while some commanders-in-chief have taken drastic measures in times of war, none have actively sought out opportunities to do so, nor have they hidden behind the mantle of fear with such fervor. On top of all that, he isn't even smart. In fact, his decisions and his personality share an earnest stupidity. Bush calls it being folksy; I call it a willing celebration of simplistic ignorance. He tries to compensate for this by surrounding himself with smarter people; unfortunately, those people are hawkishly hellbent on world hegemony. Just how evil is their agenda? When Bush is the least threatening face you have to put forward, that's a good clue.

Regardless of who ultimately earns the presidency in 2008, I hope that they sincerely reverse the disastrous hard-line that has steered the American course toward disaster and tragedy. I hope that the next president is truly a uniter, not a divider. Someone who will be open to discussion and will do what's best for America and the world, not what's best for their corporate contributors. Someone who will not take into office a sense of aristocratic birthright and a veneer of divine invincibility. Someone who will not attempt to suppress the rights of citizens who disagree with him (or her). Basically, the polar opposite of the bratus quo.

Part of me wishes Bush could run for president again just to get trounced this time around. But then again, that never stopped him before.